Free Republic

There is a lot of chatter these days – on talk radio, Fox News and conservative web sites -- about the sheer incompetence of Obama in actually governing now that he is President. One of the few dissenting voices has been Newt Gingrich's. Perhaps, he hints with a sly smile, governing is not what Obama is really about. The truth of the matter came to me while trying to discuss the AIG bonus flap with a right wing populist. His argument went something like this: “It matters not if the egregious AIG bonuses are taxed at 120% and their recipients...

ScienceDaily (Mar. 23, 2009) — Researchers are reporting compelling new scientific evidence for the existence of low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR), the process once called "cold fusion" that may promise a new source of energy.

FDIC: Citi to Buy Wachovia’s Banking Operations The FDIC made the following announcement this morning on Citi’s purchase of Wachovia’s banking operations. Citigroup Inc. to Acquire Banking Operations of Wachovia FDIC, Federal Reserve and Treasury Agree to Provide Open Bank Assistance to Protect Depositors Citigroup Inc. will acquire the banking operations of Wachovia Corporation; Charlotte, North Carolina, in a transaction facilitated by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and concurred with by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve and the Secretary of the Treasury in consultation with the President. All depositors are fully protected and there is expected to...

Republicans have become fond of copro-similes to describe the $700 billion rescue plan. They have it half right. The credit markets are jammed up with a trillion-dollar coprolith. The blockage threatens the entire system. The human body is a nature designed, self-regulating system that pretty much takes care of itself. Sometimes, however, it requires outside intervention in the form of medical attention. The economy is much the same. The Republicans are in danger of becoming economic Christian Scientists. They need to suspend doctrinal discussions and look at the patient. It desperately needs an enema. But to be effective an enema...

KEEP POLITICIANS AS FAR AWAY AS POSSIBLE FROM ANYTHING REMOTELY RESEMBLING INSURANCE Only to politicians – to whom a promise of future performance requires no current financial or intentional adjustments – would the distinction between the purchase of risky assets and insurance of the risk inherent in the assets be worth the donnybrook we have recently seen in Washington. If we purchase the assets, we will pay a price equal to the best estimates of the ultimate value of the assets minus a deep discount (premium) for the risk associated with the uncertainty of the estimates. If we insure the...

After Iowa Happy New Year and congratulations on a job well done. These have been trying times when the hyenas of war have again been turned loose on humanity by a greedy ruling class. Now, beyond all the optimism I was capable of mustering, Mr. Obama won Iowa! He won in a political arena 95 percent white. It was a resounding defeat for the manipulations of the ultra-right and their right-liberal fellow travelers. Also it was a hard lesson for liberals who underestimated the political fury of the masses in these troubled times. Obama’s victory was more than a progressive...

If it’s any consolation, this is not the beginning of the end of Western civilization. It is the end of the beginning… of the end of Western civilization. Three years ago, I wrote a screed called Tet II in which I predicted that American liberals would once again turn victory into defeat – this time in Iraq. But Bush did not crack, and I found myself actually daring to hope that our Captain MacWhirr would, out of sheer unimaginative stubbornness, tame the coolies in the hold and outlast the typhoon. [Read Conrad’s masterpiece and experience the first six years...

Researchers Evolve A Complex Genetic Trait In The Laboratory Duke University biologists have evolved a complex trait in the laboratory -- using the pressure of selection to induce tobacco hornworms to evolve the dual trait of turning black or green depending on the temperature during their development. The biologists have also demonstrated the basic hormonal mechanism underlying the evolution of such dual traits. Frederik Nijhout shows the "polyphenic" hornworm he and Yuichiro Suzuki evolved. (Photo Credit: Les Todd)Their experiments, they said, offer important insight into how complex traits involving many genes can abruptly "blossom" in an organism's evolution. The researchers...

David Kay’s testimony and commentary on WMD intelligence has been blunt, honest and neutral. But, on Fox News Sunday, he made one statement that disqualifies him as a serious policy advocate. He said that the blurred vision of our intelligence apparatus invalidates a foreign policy based on preemption -- at least until intelligence improves. Why? Does not the zone of uncertainty argue for putting preemption on a hair trigger? We do not engage in preemptive attack because we can. We attack because the danger being preempted far outweighs the known risks of the attack. In college, I once participated in...

I am writing some TV spots and need the following information ASAP: of the weapons systems used in Iraq, which did Kerry vote against? In what year? Thanks.

Donald H. Rumsfeld Secretary of Defense 1000 Defense Pentagon Washington, DC 20301-1000 6 November 2003RE: KIBITZING RUMSFELDDear Sir: In your recent memo, the contents of which were leaked to the press, you solicited ideas from your senior staff. While this was not an invitation for every Tom, Dick and Harry to start kibitzing, I will do so anyway -- everyone else is. There is nothing startling or profound in these five suggestions, but I have never seen them elsewhere. They are based on something I posted recently on the Internet called: Kibitzing Rumsfeld. TWO IRAQS Watching the young toughs dance...

EARTH TO SENATOR DASCHLE This morning on Fox & Friends, Tom Daschle complained that President Bush had run on the pledge of a humbler American foreign policy. He implied (he may well have actually made it explicit, but I turned down the sound) that Bush has broken this campaign promise. We Americans, Senator Daschle, woke up on September 11, 2001 to the spectacle of two American jumbo jets, complete with American passengers, crashing into the two tallest buildings in America’s first city, turning them into a mound of rubble. That symbolic emasculation was enough humiliation for several generations. Now we...

KIBITZING RUMSFELDDonald Rumsfeld’s famous leaked memo solicited out-of-the-box ideas from a small number of his closest advisors. He did not ask me, but I happen to have a lot of out-of-the-box ideas -- on many subjects. The following are five such ideas about the Iraq War and the War on Terrorism. Since he did not solicit me for them, I post them here where he will probably never see them. TWO IRAQSWatching the young toughs dancing on the burned out Humvee makes it clear that there are two Iraqs: Free Iraq (North and South) and Occupied Iraq (the Sunni Triangle)....

The left spun the Viet Cong defeat in Tet as a Viet Cong victory -- and lost us a war on the periphery. Now it is all happening again -- Tet II. They portray our emerging victory in Iraq as a defeat -- and risk the West’s very survival in the war on Islamic terror.

TET II:An American Recessional?by Christopher J. Barrcbarr@fsrl.comTwenty-eight years ago Saigon fell to the Communists. Although American troop had withdrawn years before, this is credited as the first real American defeat. It traumatized the nation for generations. South Vietnam actually had managed to hold on by itself for quite a while after being abandoned – relying on the U.S. primarily for fuel and ammunition. So American Leftists in Congress, exploiting administration weakness after Watergate, set up the coup de gras. They cut off even that limited aid. No more fuel; no more bullets. The North Vietnamese Army launched a general offensive....

FREE AND FAIR ELECTIONS The appeal of the New Jersey Supreme Court decision -- in the bait and switch Senate election scandal -- to the United States Supreme Court is probably a waste of time. And it would produce some dubious legal precedent. But conservatives must ask themselves -- confronted with a "national strategy" to dominate national politics through local election fraud -- whether federalist scruples are more important than fair elections. Politics is war by other means. In much of the world – most recently on the Ivory Coast – political divisions are fought out with guns. What distinguishes...

IT AIN'T THAT COMPLICATED! Christopher J. Barr Politics is a game. Like baseball. Teams meet, play according to the rules and one wins. If the rules say you can send in substitute batters or runners, you can. If the rules do not allow juggling the lineup for advantage, you can't. In the upcoming Senate election in New Jersey, the rules say you can't. Why do Democrats have so much trouble with this? They tried to game the system in Florida two years ago. Yes, it was a close election. But picking several heavily Democratic districts for a manual recount was...

19:3-26.  Vacancies in United States senate;  election to fill; temporary appointment by governor    If a vacancy shall happen in the representation of this state in the United  States senate, it shall be filled at the general election next succeeding the  happening thereof, unless such vacancy shall happen within thirty days next  preceding such election, in which case it shall be filled by election at the  second succeeding general election, unless the governor of this state shall  deem it advisable to call a special election therefor, which he is authorized  hereby to do.     The governor of this state may...

From the Independent, 9/23/02, the 2002 Winner for Childish Naivete (in these times and in a Cabinet Minister, Criminal Stupidity): "Clare Short, the Secretary of State for International Development, became the second cabinet minister yesterday to make public their fears that Britain is being dragged into US-led strikes on Baghdad.... "She said: 'We cannot have another Gulf war. We cannot have the people of Iraq suffering again. They have suffered too much. That would be wrong. We have to find a way of enforcing, quite rightly, UN resolutions. Saddam Hussein should be frightened, and the élite around him. We should...

LIVING BY THE NUMBERS Enron was a laboratory experiment: a test of post-modern accounting and, by extension, of post-modernism itself. The lessons from its failure might well be worth the cost. In the real world, a company has real assets, liabilities, incomes and outgoes. And it lives or dies by these numbers -- or, rather, by the underlying realities that the numbers supposedly reflect. The numbers, themselves, merely communicate to managers, owners and prospective owners a snapshot of the underlying reality. In the old fashioned view, a company's worth is merely the market's measure of its success or potential ...